Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Well, That Makes Sense

I was asked by a friend if I had any wacky phobias, and the first one I came up with was Luposlipophobia the fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor. This comes to me via Gary Larson, but I also harbor one of my very own, which is suddenly becoming very thin when I am walking over a grate. That and I do worry about diving into a pool and having someone slide a Plexiglas cover over the surface of the poos before I can come up for air. 
Most of the other fears I have are pretty reasonable. For example, I don't really mind heights, but I would rather not find myself teetering high above the earth with no tether or ledge upon which I could easily balance. It's a matter of survival that we all have a certain amount of fear surrounding the dangers presented by the force represented by the acceleration of gravity. It's probably best to surrender just a little bit to the idea that the higher up you go, the faster you will be going when the ground breaks your fall. Or that pool of water.
Maybe nobody explained that to Taylor Smith. At eighteen years old, maybe Ms. Smith has yet to take a course in the laws of physics, or maybe she had something different on her mind. According to the interviews she has given in the wake of shoving her friend off a sixty foot high bridge, she has suggested that she was trying to help sixteen year old Jordan Holgerson get over her acrophobia. Jordan fell all sixty of those feet, hitting the water below, resulting in broken ribs and a punctured lung. Now Taylor is being charged with reckless endangerment. 
I will say that in my own experience, there have been plenty of times where amusing "pranks" that might have gone awry but ended with a hoot from both parties in relief and a story that will be told in perpetuity. "Remember that time I threw a beer bottle at your head after I told you to stop singing 'Oklahoma?'" The ones that don't result in punctured lungs. The ones that don't end in an arrest.
And so now Jordan Holgerson will have a very rational fear of heights, as well as a deep-seated case of disamicaphobia, the fear of being shoved by your "friend" from behind. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I got all the way to the end thinking this was about Taylor Swift and wondering why I hadn't heard about it